[wei] Ensure Origin Trial enables full feature · chromium/chromium@6f47a22
github.com
This CL moves the base::Feature from content_features.h to a generated feature from runtime_enabled_features.json5. This means that the base::Feature can be default-enabled while the web API is co...
    •  wagesof   ( @wagesof@links.wageoffsite.com ) 
      40•11 months ago

      I expect we’ll lose about 90% of the web within five years as this becomes normalized.

      It will primarily be the seo driven AI crap driven ripoff regurgitated shitfest that’s arisen in the last 5 years tho.

      I’ll be waiting for a search engine to arise that only shows user controllable presentation and will use that.

      A way to filter out the corporate trash will make the human web better, not worse.

      •  interolivary   ( @interolivary@beehaw.org ) 
        20•11 months ago

        Check out Kagi. It’s a subscription search service since they don’t show you ads, but that also means they don’t track you at all (no search history, for example). They also let you influence the priorities of the sites you see in the results or even completely block them, and the results are usually better than Google with less bullshit – or even at worst as good as Google. Some people seem to be skeptical about paying for a search engine, but everybody wanting shit for free is what got us into this fucking mess in the first place

      •  monobot   ( @monobot@lemmy.ml ) 
        7•11 months ago

        I expect we’ll lose about 90% of the web within five years

        Which part? I feel it will be part I don’t even want. I might be forced to use that part for work, but that will be nice filter.

        I was thinking that “they” ( governments and big corporations) should have their own internet which is clean and ordered and “safe” and leave us on other part. This might be a way to achieve that.

    •  Flaky   ( @Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi ) 
      12•11 months ago

      You might want to recommend forks of Firefox too. Part of the reason Chrome/Chromium is dominant is because of its forks, and a fork of Firefox might appeal to someone more than the main browser. I use Pulse, but Waterfox is also solid from what I’ve heard.

    •  rm_dash_r_star   ( @rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee ) 
      12•11 months ago

      I mean that’s all I can really do.

      Unfortunately when my bank or other critical institution rejects Firefox for failure to use attestation, I can’t even do that. I’ll be forced to use Chrome. Firefox would have to adopt WEI to remain compatible. In that case I can use Firefox, but it would be the same as using Chrome.

      I’d say the monopoly Google has with Chrome is way more threatening than in the early 2000’s with MS and IE. That threat resulted in an anti-trust lawsuit, but not a peep from any government about the destruction Google is doing.

      •  honk   ( @honk@feddit.de ) 
        5•11 months ago

        I‘m old so i actually remember this but I‘m old so my memory might be shit but wasn‘t the lawsuit about the fact that microsoft shipped IE wirth windows as a default browser and not about it being too dominant?

    •  krash   ( @krash@lemmy.ml ) 
      1•11 months ago

      I know I’m just dreaming, but I really like the Gemini protocol and hope it’ll grow and develop more. It doesn’t have everything, but it’s very close to the "old web’.

    •  tesseract   ( @tesseract@programming.dev ) 
      29•11 months ago

      I’ve long been trying to de-googlify myself, but it’s certainly ramped up this year.

      Been trying out Kagi and just set up proton mail account. Not sure what I’ll land on in the end but it’s nice trying out newer services.

      •  mrmanager   ( @mrmanager@lemmy.today ) 
        6•11 months ago

        It’s not too hard. The most important things are web search and email. I still use Google Maps. But I don’t want my private emails and searches at a company who is user hostile and preditory.

      •  jae   ( @jae@reddthat.com ) English
        5•11 months ago

        I found out about Kagi from another Lemmy user and I’ve been really impressed. I feel like I’m getting better results than Google. I’m using their Personalized Results feature and it helps a ton!

  •  DogMuffins   ( @DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
    86•11 months ago

    There’s a “we told you this would happen” going on here.

    If chromium didn’t have a monopoly amongst browsers, they would have a much harder time pushing this through.

    Imagine everyone using a browser built by an advertising company.

    •  SkyNTP   ( @SkyNTP@lemmy.ml ) 
      51•11 months ago

      The problems start to happen when buisnesses adopt this en masse. Expect all banks to implement this for example. You can use Firefox all you want, but then you won’t be able to do online banking.

      Standards are really fucking important to help people stay functional in a society. This is one area that the ANCAP mindset just gets it totally wrong, unless you like the idea of being a hermit.

      Anyway, we are already seeing some websites basically reject browsers like Firefox because they basically give the consumer too much protection and freedom. Arguably we’ve seen this before, but this may be a new tier of corporate lockout of open standards as consumer protection gets thrown in the trash. Thanks America.

          •  𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏   ( @lemann@lemmy.one ) 
            1•11 months ago

            Assuming it works like Netflix (where Firefox asks permission to run DRM on the local machine) it would likely be as simple as visiting the bank’s login page to find out if they utilise this.

            If it’s mandated by law then I’m SOL… likely would just do my banking over the phone at that point

            •  argv_minus_one   ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 
              1•11 months ago

              One nice thing about the USA is that there are many banks and they are not the same.

              Chase says, “Windows, macOS, or GTFO.”

              My local credit union says, “We recommend Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Edge. Other browsers may work, but we’re not going to make promises about their security. We DGAF which OS you use; that’s your browser vendor’s problem, not ours.”

              But this could change in the future, if some misguided politician decides to “do something” about all the bank accounts getting hacked…

      •  moonmeow   ( @moonmeow@lemmy.ml ) 
        16•11 months ago

        For sure, I agree and it’s bad. But frankly unsurprising. This is the trajectory of the internet: greater control.

        We’ve become too dependent on centralized tech companies and erred in allowing tech companies to change, define, and control the internet in the first place.

        Alternatives must be promoted in mass scale.

    •  blterrible   ( @blterrible@lemmy.ml ) 
      11•11 months ago

      When websites start blocking clients that don’t implement the wei handshake, you’ll be forced to use one that does if you want to visit those sites. Firefox will either adopt it or become a second rate browser.

    •  mainframegremlin   ( @mainframegremlin@programming.dev ) 
      61•11 months ago

      Pardon formatting, on mobile. Its a form of device authentication. Apple does this with safari already BTW, and it can reduce things like captcha because the authentication is done on the backend when a request hits a server. While still an issue in concept with Apple doing it, chromium browsers are a much larger market share. In layman’s terms this is basically the company saying, hey you are attempting to visit this site, we need to verify the device (or browser, or add on configuration, or no ad blocker, etc) is ‘authentic’. Which of course is nebulous. It can be whatever the entity in charge of attestation wants it to be.

      This sets the precedent that whomever is controlling verification, can deny whomever they see fit. I’m running GrapheneOS on my phone currently, they could deny for that. Or, if you are blocking ads. Maybe you’re not sharing specific information about your device, and they want to harvest that. Too bad, comply or you’re ‘not allowed to do x or y’.

      This is the gist. The web should be able to be accessed by anybody. It isn’t for companies to own nor should it be built that way. Web2 is a corporate hellscape.

      Edit wrt Safari: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/

      •  floofloof   ( @floofloof@lemmy.ca ) 
        23•11 months ago

        I suspect “authentic” will mean “pays a license fee to Google.” In this respect it will work like other forms of DRM, and it will have the same effect of excluding new and smaller players from the market. Except in this case the market is the whole of the web.

        •  mainframegremlin   ( @mainframegremlin@programming.dev ) 
          7•11 months ago

          Yeah, definitely. Some form of extortion because ultimately that’s what will happen either way. I mean, that’s really the whole point of being the party that chooses what is authentic or not (and, what the definition of that word even means in this context). Monetary, data, whatever. Gotta keep the bottom line increasing for shareholders.

        •  mainframegremlin   ( @mainframegremlin@programming.dev ) 
          6•11 months ago

          Yeah, definitely. Some form of extortion because ultimately that’s what it will be either way. I mean, that’s really the whole point of being the party that chooses what is authentic or not (and, what the definition of that word even means in this context). Monetary, data, whatever. Gotta keep the bottom line increasing for shareholders.

        •  xradeon   ( @xradeon@lemmy.one ) 
          4•11 months ago

          No, there are no fees at all. Authentic just means approved device state, which will be defined by the website you go to I believe. So youtube might required many different things in order to be “authentic” like no ad blockers, genuine browser, non-rooted phone, etc., whereas bank-xyz may just check for one thing, like a genuine browser. Also, websites have to enable this on their side, so its not going to be used by default on all websites. The whole thing is crap though, even if only a few websites enable this, it could have huge impacts.

        •  fuser   ( @fuser@quex.cc ) 
          12•11 months ago

          Yes, it is a nightmare. The insane volume of ads and clickbait injected into web pages is killing the internet as an information source. Most of the searchable stuff is unusable. Which explains why ChatGPT was so enthusiastically embraced - it’s really just synthesizing content into a readable form that doesn’t require navigating around a jungle of animated gifs and flashing ads. That’s also I think why Lemmy and Mastodon are so refreshing to use, and hopefully will stay that way - although money seems to find a way to ruin everything. Lemmy right now feels a lot like the internet used to be before the big money came along and ruined it with advertising and platform lock-ins.

            •  fuser   ( @fuser@quex.cc ) 
              3•11 months ago

              https://andisearch.com looks like it might be a better option - thank you so much for posting. I’m mostly using duck-duck-go which is tolerable but by this point we should have come up with a more useful way to index relevant information. Google would rather we see ads than any relevant content, which wasn’t the case when they first launched google in the late 1990s. Google was refreshing at the time because of its cleaner interface than yahoo and uncluttered results, amusingly enough - it’s a far cry from what it once was.

              •  Catweazle   ( @Catweazle@social.vivaldi.net ) 
                2•11 months ago

                @fuser, Andi certainly is a fresh wind, it was the first search engine with AI which appears, before Google, Bing and the others. Great work of two very nice and friendly devs, Angie Hoover and Jed White, with an open ear to the user in their Discord channel for suggestions, feature request, bug report (well, it’s still in developement) or simple chat.

                •  fuser   ( @fuser@quex.cc ) 
                  2•11 months ago

                  Well, thanks again for the info - I’m trying it now and the results seem excellent, it took me to wikiwand, which I’d never used but it’s a front end for wikipedia - it’s quite nice. I’ve learned so much about alternative FOSS and great ad-free content by reading and posting here. I was never a great fan of reddit - liked to scroll but hardly ever posted there - I thought RPAN was the coolest thing they did - but Lemmy is great for conversation, despite the relatively small user base - I’m grateful that reddit’s nonsense drove so many helpful people here.

          •  Danny S   ( @dmanls@social.vivaldi.net ) 
            3•11 months ago

            @fuser @Lem0n Regarding articles, I just save them to a read-later app that strips them of all the crap. If the site won’t let me, I’ll find another source reporting the same information, and save it to read later. If this process ultimately fails without a saved page, I won’t read the article.

            •  fuser   ( @fuser@quex.cc ) 
              3•11 months ago

              Right - that’s a good approach, however if you’re looking for a quick answer to an immediate question by searching using a common search engine, the garbage SEO pages are the most irritating, even with adblocking.

      •  i_am_not_a_robot   ( @i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
        2•11 months ago

        To be fair, it is useful for other purposes, but the cost to users is likely to be huge, with ad blocking being one of them. It probably also prevents other things even outside your browser because there’s no point in securing a browser running in an untrusted environment. IIRC there is/was an issue running Netflix on certain Android devices and rooted devices after a similar feature was added to Android.

        •  SturgiesYrFase   ( @SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml ) 
          2•11 months ago

          My S7 was running a custom rom, I had to manually download and install the Netflix apk, as the play store wouldn’t let me do it. WhatsApp was weird too, it would let you install, but there were a bunch of aggravating bugs, like if your device was on it showed you as “online”. Got in trouble at work because my boss thought I was on my phone all day.

  •  jeebus   ( @jeebus@kbin.social ) 
    16•11 months ago

    Fuck this is trash. DRM for the web. I wish people would understand websites like kbin are not free and that if you use a website you need to pay to keep it alive. But no one wants to pay for anything on the internet, and so we have ads. Ads will for sure kill the internet.

    •  interolivary   ( @interolivary@beehaw.org ) 
      5•11 months ago

      The fact that people feel entitled to free content online really activates my almonds. They’ll whine and moan about enshittification and how eg. news is just clickbait now, and then promptly shit their pants when someone suggests they actually pay for things since they clearly don’t want ads either

      •  Anomandaris   ( @Anomandaris@kbin.social ) 
        18•11 months ago

        Surely you can reverse that and point out corporations whining and moaning about people expecting free content when they’re barely paying their employees enough to afford to pay their bills.

        The problem starts with corporate greed, hoarding revenue by keeping employee’s salaries to the minimum acceptable, providing as little functionality as possible to reduce overheads, double dipping by selling a product/subscription and then selling their customer’s data, and then complaining they aren’t getting more money for what little they are doing.

        Then inevitably a little guy like Kbin comes along and suffers because the internet is filled with soulless, ultra-capitalist corpo scumbags.

        •  interolivary   ( @interolivary@beehaw.org ) 
          1•11 months ago

          Surely you can reverse that and point out corporations whining and moaning about people expecting free content when they’re barely paying their employees enough to afford to pay their bills.

          Those are separate issues

              •  Anomandaris   ( @Anomandaris@kbin.social ) 
                7•11 months ago

                But a massive amount of them are. Small and solo creators on Youtube or Twitch need to conform to the rules of Google and Amazon, and even medium size creators are influenced and coerced by the precedents and market trends set by the much larger corporations.

                And it doesn’t matter if not all content is provided by large corporations, those large corporations employ the most people, and dictate in a lot of ways, the rules of the employment market. It’s due to their habits and practices that wages are artificially low and expenses are inflated for record profits.

                Until corporate greed is managed properly, consumers will always struggle to have enough expendable income to pay content creators, and therefore will always be searching for free content.

                •  interolivary   ( @interolivary@beehaw.org ) 
                  2•11 months ago

                  Oh yeah, no disagreement there; the source of all these problems is ultimately an economic system designed by and for sociopaths. But, be that as it may, the fact that even the people who could afford to pay for services simply don’t, and many run adblockers too and rarely turn them off for eg. news sites even if the ads they run aren’t extremely distracting. For example when ABP introduced a whitelist for “non-annoying” ads, it didn’t exactly go down well and people said they had “sold out.”

                  Big corporations can get fucked for all I care, but as I said, the ones not working for them and running services or news media or whatever also need to eat, and peoples’ reticience to pay for things in one way or another has directly led to those big companies taking over more and more of the field and WEI is an outgrowth of that.

  •  aksdb   ( @aksdb@feddit.de ) 
    14•11 months ago

    Can someone ELI5 how this could prevent a fork of Chromium from just not playing nice and telling the website “yeah yeah, it’s all untempered *wink wink*” and then still remove/alter stuff as it pleases?

    Edit: ok I think I got it … it’s basically the server that decides if it trusts the judgment of the client or not. Can’t wait to see that cat-and-mouse game going on 🙄

    •  that_one_guy   ( @that_one_guy@beehaw.org ) 
      4•11 months ago

      it’s basically the server that decides if it trusts the judgment of the client or not. Can’t wait to see that cat-and-mouse game going on

      This is partially correct. The server will check that you have a valid token issued by a trusted third party, who will almost certainly be Google, Microsoft, or Apple. When you connect to the web page, your browser will give this token to the server and say “hey look I’m legit.” The token will have enough information on it to identify that it is relevant (being provided by a client that matches the hardware it is meant to verify) as well as a cryptographic signature that verifies it is in fact from the trusted third party. So it’s less the server trusting the judgement of the client than it is the server trusting the judgement of whatever third party is attesting to your system.